David Foster Wallace. Flickr/Steve Rhodes. Some rights reserved.
“I hated childhood
I hate adulthood
And I love being alive.”
Mary Ruefle, “Provenance”, Trances of the Blast
David Foster Wallace is best known for his experimental fiction and comic essays, but a strong political current, deeply anarchist in sentiment, can be detected in works such as Infinite Jest, The Pale King, and his short stories and essays on popular culture. Wallace stood out as a uniquely radical novelist amongst his generation, although since his suicide in 2008 he has often been attacked for his supposedly reactionary politics. In 2012, Bret Easton Ellis tweeted that Wallace was “so needy, so conservative” and “the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation”. Last year, James Santel added in the Hudson Review that Wallace’s supposed conservatism stemmed from his obsession with the theme of loneliness in his writings.
